As is known in the art, there is a trend in hospitals, clinics, laboratories and other locations to perform tests (assays) on samples of patient specimens such as blood, spinal fluid, urine, serum, plasma, and the like using automated immunoassay analyzer systems. Relatively sophisticated automated analyzer systems typically accept a plurality of different patient specimen samples and perform different tests on each of the different samples. The samples may be diluted or otherwise treated depending upon the type of analyzer system used, the type of assay being performed, and other factors including but not limited to the desired analyte concentration.
The samples are typically placed in a container such as a sample cup or a primary tube for example, which is then placed in the analyzer system. One or more appropriate chemical reagents needed to perform the assays are also placed in the analyzer system. The reagents are typically mixed with the samples in the analyzer system via a fluid moving system generally provided as a pipette controlled by a robotic arm. The pipette is adapted to aspirate portions of the reagents and/or samples and dispense them into appropriate ones of the cuvettes where a reaction can take place.
Different types of assays may require different amounts of the sample specimen, different amounts of reagents, different processing steps, different incubation times, etc. . . . Thus one problem which arises in automated analyzer systems is that it may be necessary to reset the system and load different reagents or it may even be necessary to re-program the automated analyzer system prior to processing a new assay.
For example, even if only a few of several different types of assays need to be run, the operator-user must load and run the analyzer system for the first type of assay and then after the testing on the first type of assay is complete, the operator-user must reload and reset the analyzer system to run the next different type of assay on another batch of samples using perhaps different reagents and so on. These steps are repeated until all of the different assays are complete. Thus, although such automated analyzer systems can provide assay results more quickly and conveniently than manual approaches, overall throughput of the analyzer system is not maximized.
It would be desirable therefore to provide an automated analyzer system capable of processing more than one type of assay on specimen samples in an unattended run and capable of performing different types of assays on a number of different specimen samples simultaneously without resetting the analyzer system or reloading reagents or other chemicals in the analyzer system prior to processing the different types of assays to thus increase the overall throughput of the analyzer system.